Our 10 Best Italian-American Heroes

May 28, 2010

The invention of the Italian-American hero must be considered one of the happiest occurrences of 20th-century American cuisine. It happened in the 1920s. French bread had just been introduced into the United States and caused a craze. Every Italian-American bakery in Brooklyn was making demi-baguettes: bulbous loaves, crusty on the outside, lightweight in the middle, prone to go stale unless used quickly.

Sicilians and other southern Italians had been coming to New York City in increased numbers since 1900, remaking their cuisine by substituting products found in America for ones they’d known back home. Thus the Italian hero was born, a perfect showcase for the wealth of raw ingredients available in the New World.

Roast beef was unknown in Italy; here it was abundant and could be used to make magnificent sandwiches with fresh mozzarella and brown gravy borrowed from English and German neighbors and voila! The iconic Italian-American hot roast beef hero was born (a close cousin of the Philly cheesesteak). Other early heroes were made with luscious combinations of cold cuts, fried eggplant, broccoli rabe, and — humblest of all — eggs and peppers or eggs and potatoes.

The name “hero,” by the way, was coined in the 1930s by New York Herald Tribune writer Clementine Paddleford, who needed a way to describe the gigantic Italian sandwiches that were currently becoming popular in the city.

It was hard to limit ourselves to only 10 hero shops, and we had to neglect many fine establishments to do so, but here are our choices. Please feel free to disagree, and tell us about your own favorites.

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Nick’s Special, seen in cross section, from Defonte’s Sandwich Shop.

10. Chicken Cutlet Hero, Bella Napoli, 130 Madison Avenue, Murray Hill, 212-683-4510. Crisp chicken cutlets layered with good mozzarella and warmed in the convection oven at the last minute make this a memorable hero.

4. Meatball Hero, The Meatball Shop, 84 Stanton Street, Lower East Side, 212-982-8895. There are some newfangled aspects to the meatball hero at the Meatball Shop. For one thing, the bread is better suited to the format, crusty on the outside, yet yielding enough to not squirt meatballs out the end. As far as I know, real mozzarella has never been put on such a hero before, and the result is devastatingly good.

2. Hot Roast Beef Hero, Fiore House of Quality, 414 Adams Street, Hoboken, New Jersey, 201-659-1655. The roast beef is made on the premises, and so is the mozzarella, the latter of such high quality that it’s notorious on either side of the Hudson. Their take on what would normally be a Brooklyn phenomenon is spectacular.

1. “Italian Special,” Faicco’s Pork Store, 260 Bleecker Street, 212-243-1974; 6511 Eleventh Avenue, Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, 718-236-0119. This legendary pork store was founded in the West Village in 1900, and their roster of hero sandwiches is only a fraction of the store’s porcine appeal. The ultimate hero is a cold assemblage of prosciutto, capocollo (spicy neck-meat ham), soppressata, fresh mozzarella, and pickled red peppers. Curious how refreshing a cold hero can be.